by Simon Mawer
Magda saw the article about this weeping Madonna. She found the newspaper thrown aside and the photograph immediately caught her attention. I watched her pick the paper up and take it over to the sofa, where she curled up cat-like and read the article slowly and thoughtfully, with the small pink bud of her tongue lodged between her lips in childish concentration. There is something childlike about her. She has the manners of a child dressed up in the disturbing garb of an adult. ‘Have you seen?’ she asked when she reached the end.
‘It’ll be a load of rubbish,’ I said. ‘A bit of pious superstition and a lot of commercial exploitation.’
My indifference seemed to annoy her. ‘We go there,’ she decided. The inclusive we. The uncertain present tense. ‘We go there and I am praying for you.’
I confess to a small frisson of delight at the thought that Magda intended to pray for me at the shrine of a plaster Madonna. It is a novel experience to be the subject of prayer rather than the object of damnation.
A train in peacetime, a stuttering progression through the Roman campagna in overcrowded, grimy carriages. One almost expects chickens in the luggage racks and pigs in the baggage van. A dull and expressionless countryside traipsed past the windows. Dull and expressionless passengers stared at us with a fine lack of discrimination: they would have stared at anything and anyone. Hunchbacks and gypsies would have been equal objects of their gaze. Respectable lawyers and dubious businessmen, anyone would have been regarded with insolent curiosity. There was only us and so they stared at us. What did they see? An incongruous couple speaking in foreign words: he well into his middle age, with a dry and withered face; she with the blemished complexion and heavy makeup of a tart. He biting the inner surface of his lower lip, she chewing gum with the empty concentration of a cow chewing the cud.
Did the electric current of physical contact pass between this disparate couple?
No.
Did they show a fraction of affection?
Minimal.
Did they share the same bed?
Probably.
Were they man and wife, man and lover, man and mercenary?
Impossible to say.
The passengers stared.
We left the train at a station somewhere near the coast, a halt with a single station building and a single platform. Electric blue letters, blocked on the wall of the station by some spray-paint artist, announced, in English:
The Beast
As we waited for a bus Magda produced a sketchbook from her bag and roughed out some pencil strokes on one of the sheets. A section of wall, the biblical slogan, the broken windows of the station building emerged from the plain white paper. She has that ability, the strange power of the artist to take possession of the world, to possess it and remodel it in her own manner.
The bus finally arrived to take us and a few other lost souls to the Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Paludi (Our Lady of the Swamps). There was nowhere to purchase tickets and thus on the final leg of our pilgrimage to salvation we travelled illicitly.
The sanctuary lay amongst eucalyptus trees on reclaimed ground that had once been part of the Pontine Marshes. There was a large car park with a section reserved for coaches, but on this indifferent autumn day in the middle of the week there were few vehicles – a single coach of Polish tourists, a few private cars, a minibus loaded with nuns. Beyond the car park was a small encampment of stalls selling trinkets and amulets. Things fluttered in the breeze like bunting at a fair: rosaries, crucifixes, medallions. Heads of Christ dripped blood from their thorns, portraits of Padre Pio held bandaged hands in prayer. Effigies of the Pope hobbled over his episcopal crook; Saint Francis fondled the wolf.
And there was the weeping Madonna. Everywhere there was the weeping Madonna. White and glistening she lay in careful rows like grubs in a beehive, like clones on a laboratory bench. There were pocket-size madonnas and madonnas for the mantelpiece and madonnas for the hallway, and doubtless madonna-shaped soap for the bathroom. There were madonnas that glowed in the dark and others with internal lighting. They all had the same form, the same praying hands clasping the same rosary; and the same witness to the miracle: a smear of rust red running down from sightless eyes over passive alabaster cheeks.
Magda picked over these items like a customer at a market stall looking for the best fruit. ‘Let’s see the sanctuary,’ I suggested.
‘Wait.’
‘We didn’t come for this. We came to see the real thing.’ My tone was mocking, I knew that. I worked on my tone of voice, had always done so. Tone is fifty per cent of the meaning. But Magda couldn’t read my tone. Madeleine would have laughed.
‘Nothing is real,’ Magda said. Whether she was speaking of this miraculous Madonna or of life in general, I couldn’t be sure.
‘I’m real,’ I said. ‘You’re real. This whole awful place is real.’ I waited while she chose her statuette and handed over the money. She fed the statuette into her bag and turned to the business of the day with a solemn expression.
The sanctuary itself was a recent building of concrete slabs and steel joists, a modern place slung together as though in haste. Angles didn’t quite meet: awkward gaps were bridged by slabs of coloured glass so that the whole construction looked like something built by a child out of plastic pieces. The words I AM THE HANDMAID OF THE LORD were inscribed in gold above the entrance.
A crowd had developed around the paltry building. Where they had all come from was impossible to say, but there was something like a real pilgrim crowd edging towards the entrance. ‘You keep close,’ said Magda and her hand snaked into mine, her tough, paint-stained fingers lacing through my own. We shuffled through double doors of glass into an atrium where posters announced trips to Lourdes, trips to Fatima, trips to Medjurgorje itself. Portraits of Padre Pio smiled benignly upon us. Hidden speakers played Schubert’s Ave Maria on instruments that had never been seen on earth. The expectancy of the crowd was a palpable thing, a substance in the air around which any ancillary noise had to edge its way. Stewards searched for naked shoulders or bare knees. Under their guidance the random herd of pilgrims coalesced into a queue and shuffled forward into the body of the church like a single organism, a snake.
Magda clutched at my fingers like a child drawing comfort from a father. ‘This is pure nonsense,’ I whispered. She hushed me to silence. She wore a beatific smile, as though she had just seen the light. Her black figure was like the black of the old women in the queue, a funereal, penitential black. ‘Strange,’ she whispered.
There were shadows and pools of coloured light in the body of the church. Hunched forms knelt before the main altar. A disembodied murmuring seemed to be extruded from the tawdry fabric of the building, a muttering, a whimpering, like the mumbling of the feeble-minded. The queue snaked round the inner wall of the church and down a side aisle, edging towards a niche at the far end where a dazzling light splintered from edges of tinsel and gilt, where the Madonna awaited her supplicants, her poorly modelled hands fused together in prayer, her tears, the miraculous tears, mere workaday smears of rust red like a poorly staunched but trivial cut. KEEP MOVING said the signs in four languages, but the snake tried to disobey, pausing and writhing as though in pain, bowing its head before the Virgin to allow it to be bruised. Old women and young women, men and boys, the halt and the lame all stumbled before the image as though they were witnessing a celestial vision and not a cheap and tawdry statue, a thing of pure spirit not a machine-made lump of glazed plaster. Magda knelt and signed herself, and pulled me down beside her. For a moment I was there on my knees beside her, her hand still clutching mine to hold me down. What passed through my mind? A faint glimmer of prayer, like a last ember in a fire that has otherwise died out? A mere emptying of the mind in the hope, the impoverished hope, that someone might speak there, into the space?
Madeleine, I thought.
Outside, the daylight was dazzling. Magda was solemn with the grandeur of the moment. She found a seat and sat down with h
er sketchpad to make some little intricate drawings from memory – figures hunched, figures shuffling forward like prisoners in a queue for the latrines, broken figures with bent and twisted limbs. I stood beside her and tried to pray.
Beside the sanctuary was a trattoria announcing pasta delle lacrime, pasta with tears. We had lunch there before getting the bus back to the station. On the journey home Magda’s face seemed heavy and coarse, like a clumsy, badly made carnival mask. At one point she took the plaster statuette out of her bag and looked at it thoughtfully. I knew what she would do with it when she got back to the flat. It would find a place out on the rooftop terrace, where it could see the whole panorama of the city, where she could watch it carefully as though daring it to weep before her. And then she would pull out a canvas and some pots of paint, clotted round the lids like blood round the edge of a fresh wound, and she would begin to work, and the Madonna would float in the midst of a collage of newspaper and holy picture, of worshipping crowds and damned souls, and a serpent would crown the whole scene.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ I told her as she worked.
‘What?’
‘Wait.’ There was the trunk against one wall of the living room, the battered old trunk that had followed me round my life before finally fetching up here like flotsam cast on some distant and unexpected beach. I opened the lid and took out an envelope. It was richly decorated with foreign stamps and postmarks. ‘This.’
She watched, head on one side, mouth twisted so that she could bite the inside of her lip. I slid the page out and held it for her to see. Fragments of the thing came out with it. Bits, crumbs, dust.
‘What is this?’
The dry and arid sheet, like rice paper, like rice paper grown discoloured with age. The lettering crawled and writhed across its surface, an exotic, esoteric script. I saw MOΔIN: Modin.
Magda stepped forward and peered to see. ‘What is this? This is old?’
‘Very old.’
She put out a finger to touch it.
‘You can use it,’ I said. ‘Here, take it. You can use it if you like.’
‘It is precious?’
‘It is very precious, but you can use it. It is yours.’
She smiled with delight at the idea of being given something precious. She took the sheet and held it on the palm of one hand and smiled down at it. ‘With my Madonna picture,’ she decided.
‘You’re holding it upside down,’ I told her.
I watched her work. I watched the quick, deft strokes, the way in which paint became object, the sure balance of abstract lines, the strange colours, the curious fragments pasted into the picture, the faded letters of Koine, that language that was the language of commerce and social interchange and scripture. The language that has had greater impact on the world than any other, painted now into the world of the weeping Madonna. Fragments of newspaper and scripture arranged in delicate harmony around the lady with the drops of acrylic crimson that fall like jewels down her cheeks.
Madonna che fa miracoli one of the newspaper fragments says. The Madonna who performs miracles. TOΣΩMATOHPMENONETΣΦHΛAΘPA says another piece. Then there is a bit of a holy picture painted into the composition, and some thistles, and in the background flames, tongues of fire.
Lac Léman
Mrs Margaret Newman, English, enigmatic, a foreigner in this city of foreigners, walks down the narrow streets of the old town towards the waterfront. Behind her, tucked beneath the eaves of an old and narrow house on the rue des Granges, lies the apartment. Ahead of her, visible between the narrow houses, Le Jardin Anglais and Lac Léman and the great plume of water that dashes sudden rainbows against the sky. Around her the insouciant bustle of a city that is not at war.
This will do, she thinks.
She is wearing a floral frock with a cardigan thrown over her shoulders against the cool breeze, and when she walks men turn and watch. One gentleman even approaches her and raises his hat and addresses her in French as madame and wishes her good morning. ‘Voulez-vous venir avec moi?’
She rebuffs him with that way she has of making the shape of a smile without any of the underpinnings of welcome. The man moves on. There are other more welcoming smiles, Frenchwomen who managed to cross over the border and are living as refugees, living in the only way there is to live in a country that is overflowing with the dispossessed and the displaced.
Mrs Newman has just come from hearing mass. Mass in this city of Protestantism gives her a small stir of delight. She has already found a church and a priest to whom she can offer her delicate confessions.
She finds a bench in the English Gardens. She sits, crossing her legs and arranging her skirt modestly over her knees, and tries not to think too much. No newspapers, no wireless, no news from over the border. She takes a book from her bag and opens it at the mark and begins to read – Jane Austen, of course. Of course Jane Austen. It is possible to ignore a war. The characters in Jane Austen’s books seem to spend much of their time ignoring their own particular war, the incessant war against Napoleon. She reads her book and feels the stirring inside her. She will find herself a doctor. She will have the tests done – they will inject her urine into toads – but she doesn’t really need the tests. She knows. She knows everything: it will be a boy. It will be Leo; a kind of resurrection. Her atonement will be complete.
It is maybe twenty minutes later that another man approaches – young, slightly awkward, slightly effeminate with his soft collar and foppish hair. ‘Madame Newman?’ he asks. He makes an awkward half-bow, as though he is uncertain whether the gesture has quite gone out of fashion yet.
She marks her page carefully and closes her book. ‘Oui. Je suis la Madame Newman.’
The young man looks relieved. ‘I think perhaps we should go somewhere less conspicuous,’ he suggests. It is a curious sentence, beginning in poorly accented French and ending in perfect German. ‘I am Paul Weatherby of the … ah … British Foreign Office. I understand that you wish to talk to someone about your … how shall I put it? … difficulties.’
She likes the aristocratic hesitations, the hesitant manner. They are unmistakable. She also likes the fact that there is a car in the background, conspicuously manned by other, less effete men. ‘I think that is an excellent idea,’ she says. She gets up from the bench, puts her book into her bag, settles her cardigan over her shoulders. ‘You see, I wish to return home.’
